October 18, 2016 – Offered in collaboration with the Charleston Library Conference, the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) presents a pre-conference session titled Predators, “Pirates” and Privacy: Educating Researchers on New Challenges in Publishing. It will be held Wednesday, November 2, 2016, the day preceding the annual Charleston Conference, at the Courtyard Marriott, Charleston, SC.

From the journals on Beall’s List to the controversy surrounding the availability of articles on sites such as SciHub, the discussion focuses on the emerging challenges that scholarly communication faces from a new set of players. Today’s researchers must publish to attain promotion and tenure, but the increasingly complex publishing space now leaves them in need of a new and different level of support, from librarians, publishers, and peers.

Starting with panel sessions and then moving to a roundtable discussion, attendees will learn about the information industry conversations taking place around predatory publishing practices, “piracy,” and privacy, and how even seemingly innocuous actions (such as sharing a username and password) can have negative implications for faculty and researchers and their universities. They will also learn about the multitude of ways that predatory publishers attempt to manipulate authors through fake journals, fictitious editorial boards, lack of peer review, and spurious article processing charges.

A panel of experts has been recruited from the publishing, librarian, government, and vendor communities to discuss the challenges of authentication and privacy along with new ways to ensure the integrity of scholarly communications. Heather Staines, Director of Publisher and Content Strategy at ProQuest; Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication at University of Utah – J Willard Marriott Library; Todd Carpenter, Executive Director at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO); Regina Reynolds, ISSN Coordinator at Library of Congress; Craig Griffin, Solutions Engineer at Silverchair Information Systems; Ken Varnum, Senior Program Manager for Discovery, Delivery, and Library Analytics at University of Michigan Library; David Crotty, Editorial Director, Journals Policy at Oxford University Press; Todd Toler, Vice President of Digital Product Management at Wiley.

“We all need to be aware of predatory journals that trap unwitting researchers and give legitimate publishers a bad name,” notes Staines, who is also a Member, Board of Directors at COUNTER. “We should also be aware of how pirate initiatives like SciHub threaten the scholarly communications ecosystem and trick researchers into sharing credentials that put their universities at risk. But improving security and access, as well as in collecting data needed for personalization features, requires balancing privacy issues with transparency.”

Learned Publishing Access

The October issue of Learned Publishing is packed with fascinating, must-read articles!

If you are interested in open access, this new issue is for you. Our authors this month address piracy and its impacts on the success of open access publishing, challenging both green and gold OA models. In the first of two installments, interviews with senior publishers and editors produces original insights into how and why publishers launch OA mega-journals. And, looking at the broader context of Korean scholarly communications, another article shares the OA models in play in Korea.

The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "to advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking."

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